


Here Is Your Heart, Beating

by PaperKatla



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Anxiety, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, mental health fish, pet fish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 20:22:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7121242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaperKatla/pseuds/PaperKatla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caitlin convinces Cisco to purchase fish. Things don't go smoothly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here Is Your Heart, Beating

**Author's Note:**

> I find a lot of peace staring into a fish tank. There's something really calming about watching another creature move about it's life, simply, to the quiet sound of burbling water. I highly recommend it. 
> 
> The title of this is fic taken from the poem "Great Plains" by D. Allen, which I felt discussed some really interesting and applicable themes of fear and intimacy.

Caitlin suddenly remembers she needs cat food halfway between Jitters and STAR Labs and makes a sharp left turn on a yellow light that has Cisco scrambling for a good grip on the oh shit handle. It had been Cisco’s idea that she get the cat, a few months after the particle accelerator exploded and took Ronnie with it. She’d looked a bit unsure when he arrived at her apartment two weeks into their partial unemployment, holding up the angriest looking orange tabby the local shelter had. “His name is Schrodinger and he’s yours now,” he’d explained, dropping the cat on the sofa as it sank its sharp teeth into his hand.

As they skid into a parking space—Tokyo drift style—in front of a pet store two blocks away, Cisco can’t help but regret ever getting her the cat. He follows Caitlin into the pet shop, careful not to touch anything. He vibes less now that the breaches are closed, but they still happen on occasion, leaving a niggling, repetitive thought in the back of his mind: _Is this real?_

Is _this_ real?

Is this _real_?

He’s pretty sure the pet store is real, though. So, as Caitlin picks out her organic, gluten-free, no-preservatives cat food for Schrodinger, he allows himself to wander around the aisles, hands tucked into his armpits. He looks at cat collars, and the brightly colored birds, he dodges some lady being dragged down the aisle by her, frankly, enormous dog, and watches a little girl in a princess costume beg her parents for a bright orange corn snake. It’s noisy in the pet store, and some of his brand-new, Evil Wells-induced anxiety seems to not like that, so he walks deeper into the store, shoulders scrunched by his ears.

Caitlin finds him a few minutes later, in the dark, quiet corner of the pet store where tanks full of brightly colored fish line the walls. He’s staring at a tank of brightly colored tetras, each about an inch long. His breathing is even. His arms have fallen to his sides. If Cisco is being honest with himself, it’s the calmest he’s felt in weeks, if not months. Because, sure, he can hold a gun to Caitlin’s doppelganger without trembling, and he knows how to throw a punch, and take a punch, and he can throw snark with the best of them, even in the face of some of the scariest metahumans. But there’s just something about having your heart shredded apart that leaves a guy with a persistent, underlying case of anxiety.

Just because he could be brave, doesn’t mean he wasn’t freaking out all the time.

“You should get them,” Caitlin says. She’s holding a giant bag of expensive, organic cat food in her arms, and smiling at him. It’s the smile she gives him after he wakes up after some injury, or when he makes some particularly bad joke that she thinks was hilarious, but isn’t ready to break character long enough to laugh at. It’s a fond smile. It makes Cisco feel like somehow he got a sister out of the mess that was his metahuman-filled life, and warms the cockles of his not-shredded heart.

“I d’know,” he replies. “Between CCPD and STAR Labs, I’m barely home.”

“So, put them in your work room at STAR Labs,” she says. “No one will mind.”

“That doesn’t seem very professional…”

Caitlin raises a perfect eyebrow. “You wear children’s t-shirts to work—”

“They’re not children’s shirts!”

“—and it’s not like anyone’s gonna complain to HR.”

Cisco blinks stupidly at her. “Unless Tomasz the janitor has been keeping secrets, we don’t have an HR.”

Caitlin smiles. “Exactly!”

\---

Cisco decides to set up the fish tank on a shelf near the end of his worktable. It’s a nice spot, near enough to him that the quiet burbling and hum of the tank would be audible while he works, and in a warmer corner so that the fish would, hopefully, be comfortable in their new home. The two-point-five gallon tank he bought is in pieces on the floor in front of him as he assembles the built-in filtration system. Jesse is sitting cross-legged on the floor across from him, holding the plastic bag of fish up towards the fluorescent lights with one hand and clutching a strawberry flavored Jarritos in the other. On the laptop next to her _Red Dwarf_ plays. “What kind of fish are they?” she asks.

He looks up, brushing his hair out his eyes. He’d decided pretty quickly that he likes Jesse. She’s smart, a bit cocky, but endlessly curious about what she doesn’t know. It was why she was now eight episodes deep into _Red Dwarf_ , after already having binge-watched all ten seasons of _The X-Files_ with him. It was why she now drank Jarritos like it was the sweet ambrosia of the gods. It was why there was a stack of books beside her bed almost three feet high. It was why she was now poking at the side of his fish’s bag. “They’re a genetically modified form of tetra.”

“Genetically modified animals aren’t known for the being the heartiest,” Jesse muses.

“Hey, watch what you say,” he snips. “You’ll upset Rojo and Bluey.”

She, gently, sets the fish down and holds her hands up in surrender.

Barry speeds in with a blast of tailwind, holding a plastic pirate ship and a fluorescent orange, fake plant in an old towel. When Caitlin and Cisco had arrived an hour before with the fish and all the accouterments, Barry had eagerly offered to help, and Cisco had put him to work washing off the tank accessories “at normal human speed”. “Okay, one sunken pirate ship and one disco fern,” he says, setting them down, still dripping, on the seat of Cisco’s office chair. “What else?”

Cisco looks up. The big nerd is practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. Sneakers not quite smoking, but definitely looking a bit melted around the soles from him run from the med bay to Cisco’s workroom at the far end of the building. “Rocks,” he says, pointing at the bag of glow-in-the-dark aquarium gravel sitting a few feet away from him, next to his own half-finished bottle of delicious, mango-flavored, Mexican soda. There was a rush of wind and his hair blew back into his face again, so by the time he fussed every last strand back into place both Barry and the bag of rocks were long gone.

Jesse snorts, rolling onto her stomach to look at the fish again. “I won a goldfish once at a school fair,” she says, her breath fogging the bag. “I guessed the correct number of jellybeans in a jar. I got to keep the jellybeans, too. It died after I tried to feed it one of the jellybeans.”

“Wow,” Cisco drawls. “What a touching story.”

Jesse hums and goes back to watching tv on the laptop as Barry comes rushing back in. In his hands he’s gripping a kidney-bean shaped metal bowl that he clearly stole for the medical bay. The aquarium gravel rattles inside the bowl as Barry plunks it down on the work table. “Ready?”

Cisco looks over at the bag holding Rojo and Bluey, watches the players from _Red Dwarf_ reflect and warp on the plastic. Jesse sits up, looking about as eager as Barry as they both wait for him to make the final tweeks to the tank’s filter. “Yeah,” he says.

It takes them forever to convince him to go home that evening. Watching the fish was too nice.

\---

Cisco enters the cortex the next morning to find Caitlin, Jesse, and Barry all waiting for him with grim expressions. “What?” he asks, suddenly nervous. “What happened?”

They take him to his work room, where Rojo and Bluey are belly-up in the tank. He feels his stomach sink down into his belly. An odd mix of emotions arises at the site of the dead fish—sadness at his loss, confusion at what could have possibly gone wrong, shame that he couldn’t keep a couple of fish alive. He pushes all of the emotions down, tells himself that they’re just fish, they don’t matter. But it’s a lie. The fish did matter. He had let Caitlin convince him to buy them because she saw how happy he was watching them, because he recognized how calm he was watching them. They weren’t just fish, they were mental health fish. And he’d killed them.

\---

“So, it says here you’re supposed to do something called ‘cycling the tank’,” says Barry, reading from his phone as Caitlin and Cisco returned from the pet store after turning in Rojo and Bluey’s remains. “It’s like, you’re basically caring for an empty tank for a month until there’s the right amount of ammonia and chemicals in the water.”

Cisco nods, feeling like a failure of a scientist for not putting the appropriate amount of research into fish and their apparently fragile environments. So, he starts doing exactly that. He changes the water, and the filter. He buys real plants instead of plastic ones, he adds the right amount of chemical solutions. The tank becomes his baby. He recognizes its quiet burbling when it’s running well, or the stilted, spitting noises it makes when the filter is askew.

He has to get it right. Caitlin had been a mess after Ronnie’s passing, but she could still care for herself, for Schrodinger. She kept her chin up and her shoulders back. Even Barry had moved on, working harder than ever on being the Flash, on helping people. Cisco kept his hands in his pockets, though. He hunched his shoulders. He kept his hand placed over his heart, while he fought to keep his breath, to keep himself from panicking. He always felt scared these days. He needs to succeed with the fish. He needs something calming to look at. He needs to succeed like Caitlin and Barry were succeeding.

“It looks nice,” Caitlin says, slipping into his lab on evening.

He nods, opening up her arms in the offer of a hug. She slips quietly into his arms. “I’m sorry about Eliza,” he mumbles. “And Jay.”

“I’m sorry you had to be the one to vibe it,” she replies quietly. “I know we ask a lot of you and your powers sometimes. I’m sorry.”

He shrugs, feels the weight of her head shift. “It’s okay.”

“Does it still hurt you?”

“A little.”

They both stare silently into the empty tank, watching the plants flutter under the tiny current created by the filtration system. Caitlin lets out a slow breath. “This is nice. I can see how you find it calming. It will be even better when you have fish in it.”

\---

The week Cisco gets his fish is the week that Barry gives up his speed.

He and Caitlin had tested the water samples themselves, and then made the trip back to the pet store. The employee there convinced him that three smaller fish would be a better fit than two big ones in his tiny tank. So, while Caitlin picked up a cat toy for Schrodinger, he carefully selected his fish: a soft green one, a bright pink one, and a yellow one.

They looked very colorful inside the small tank in his work room. The tank’s light glowed a soft blue, the fish a riot of color in the dark space. It was exactly as calming as he remembers it from inside the pet store. From the first time with Rojo and Bluey. He feels the tension ease away from his shoulders, a cool sense of calm trickling down his spine. His world slips down to a pinhole of just him, breathing evenly, and the fish bobbing in the tank. There is no Zoom. There are no vibes. There is no pain. There is no fear.

He doesn’t realize he falls asleep until Caitlin shakes him gently awake, and offers to drive him home.

“I’m okay,” he replies. “I’m gonna stay a little longer.”

\---

When Barry saves his mother, Cisco doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember that once he was a superhero of sorts, with a nickname, and friends, and a job at STAR Labs. He doesn’t remember all the amazing things, all the frightening things. He doesn’t dream of a hand slipping into his heart at night. He goes to work and comes back with little fuss.

Until one day, he passes a pet store, a display of fish in the window and stops.

“Huh,” he says. “Déjà vu. Weird.”

And then he walks in.


End file.
